The Sweetest Watermelon in Appalachian Gardens Was Called Extinct. A Farmer Found It Again in 1981

🔗 90 things every Appalachian grandmother knew about the ground. How many are left in your family? https://burlsizemore.com/porch-almanac The summer I turned nine, my grandfather split a watermelon on the porch so dark green it looked black, with little yellow stars all over the rind and one big yellow moon on the side. And when the knife went in, the meat was not red. It was yellow, yellow as fresh butter, and sweeter than any melon I have eaten since. By the time I was a grown man you could not buy a seed of it anywhere in this country. The catalogs had dropped it, the books said it was gone, and my own brother told me a watermelon is red and always has been. In this video I walk you through one summer on that hillside, the way it went every year when I was a boy, and at every step what the old men knew about growing a melon big and sweet: why they waited on the dirt and not the calendar, the bushel of rotted manure in the bottom of every hill, the seed soaked overnight in a saucer on the windowsill, the pie pans for the crows, cutting six seedlings down to two with a pocketknife, the old gray hay nobody else wanted, a board under every melon, the sunflowers for the bees, and how to tell a ripe one by the curl, the belly and the knock. And the two things my grandfather did that no other man on our creek would do, which he would not explain to me for years. One of them made my grandmother cry one dry August. Then the little red tobacco tin on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard, where every seed of that melon lived, and what happened to it. And how a farmer in Missouri, sitting in his living room in nineteen eighty, picked up a telephone and brought it back. Nobody on our creek ever wrote any of it down. So I bought a spiral notebook and put it on paper, one thing a night at the kitchen table: ninety things the people of these mountains knew about the ground, every season of the year, and why they did it the way they did. I am Burl Sizemore. Thank you for sitting on the porch with me all the way to the last slice. https://burlsizemore.com/porch-almanac